George Miller: “today is the day when we begin the process where we rearrange the priorities of this Nation, where we rearrange the…”

“today is the day when we begin the process where we rearrange the priorities of this Nation, where we rearrange the priorities of this Nation that for many years has taken care of the senior citizens of this country by providing them Medicare healthcare coverage for their elderly years, where we rearrange the priorities of this Nation where we have tried to make sure that children had coverage of health care, where we have tried to provide families the means by which they could pay for the college education of their children. What we now see in the budget plan that we will debate this afternoon and in the tax bill that we will debate tomorrow is that all of those goals, all of those ideals of this Nation, are threatened because we have to have a tax bill that gives $27,000 in relief to people making more than $250,000 a year. Twenty-seven thousand dollars in tax relief, which is more than many families make all year long, must go to the wealthiest 1 percent in this country, and how do we pay for it? We pay for it by reneging on the promise to provide health care coverage for children. In the Senate they now talk about making 8 million elderly people who are between the ages of 65 and 67 wait 2 more years before they would have Medicare coverage by increasing the cost of the Medicare to those individuals.”